Conference organization
• 31/03/2017: Morpho-syntactic isoglosses in Indo-European: diachrony, typology and linguistic areas, workshop at ISTAL23, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), together with Nikolaos Lavidas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and Leonid Kulikov (Ghent University).
• 22–24/05/2014: CBC5. Space, culture, language and politics in South Asia: common patterns and local distinctions, Sapienza University of Rome.
• 15/06/2012: Translation Techniques in the Asiatic Cultures. Panel at CBC3, University of Cagliari (Italy).
• 8–10/09/2011: CBC2. The Study of South Asia between Antiquity and Modernity. Parallels and Comparisons, Sapienza University of Rome.
• 10–12/06/2010: CBC1. Lo studio dell'Asia fra antico e moderno, Sapienza University of Rome.

Funded research projects
• “Transitivity in Indo-Aryan” (Marie Skłodowska-Curie project, 2017)
• “The Evolution of Case, Alignment and Argument Structure in Indo-European” (EVALISA), member of the project supervised by Prof. Jóhanna Barðdal, Ghent University and funded by the ERC (2014)
• An encyclopedic description of Indo-Aryan languages (joint project based on Institute of Linguistics, Moscow; Institute of Linguistic Research, St. Petersburg, Russia; University of Hamburg) (2009–2012)
• “Case Cross-linguistically”, University of Nijmegen (2002–2004)

Membership in Editorial Boards
2017: Editor-in-chief of the Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, de Gruyter, Berlin
2014–2017: Review Editor of the Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, de Gruyter, Berlin
2010: Associate Editor of the Journal of Historical Linguistics, John Benjamins, Amsterdam
2017: member of the Scientific Board of the series Typological Studies in Indo-European Languages
2015: member of the Editorial Board of the Archivio Glottologico Italiano
2010: member of the Editorial Board of Lingua Posnaniensis
2007: member of the Editorial Board of Acta Orientalia Vilnensia, Vilnius (Lithuania)
1995–1997: member of the Editorial Board of the IIAS Newsletter, Leiden, International Institute of Asian Studies

Awards and grants
• 2016: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for the project “Transitivity in Indo-Aryan”
• 2004: Grant of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for the post-doctoral project “Valence-changing categories in Indo-Aryan: a diachronic typological approach” (Veni 2004), carried out at Leiden University
• 2004: Grant of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for the project “A grammar of the Rgveda”, carried out at University of Göttingen
• 1999–2004: Grants of Leids Universiteits Fonds (LUF) for attending international conferences
• 2001: NWO-Grant for compiling the electronic etymological database “Indo-Aryan inherited lexicon”

2. Informazioni sulle attività di ricerca congiunta

2.1 Sintesi del progetto di ricerca

The visiting professorship invitation for Prof. Leonid Kulikov must be viewed as belonging to a long standing research program on the Convergent Indo-European Morphological Isoglosses, currently being carried out by the proponent. Prof. Kulikov is one of the best contemporary specialists in the Indo-European morphology in general, and in the field of convergent morphological developments, in particular, investigating the system of verbal voices and transitivity oppositions and the system of nominal cases in the history of the Indo-European languages.

The last decades are marked with an increasing interest towards the study of isoglosses shared by some branches of the Indo-European language family (see Keidan 2013). As is well-known, next to well-established branches such as Germanic, Greek or Indo-Iranian, there are larger subdivisions within Indo-European, grouping together several branches, in accordance with a number of features, traditionally called isoglosses, shared by more than one group, or by several languages not belonging to the same group (branch-crossing isoglosses). Such isoglosses always were the subject of vivid debates in Indo-European scholarship, giving rise to numerous hypotheses on early splits within Proto-Indo-European or, on the contrary, later contacts among historically attested languages. A systematic research of this issue still remains a desideratum, however.

Next to a few notorious isoglosses, such as the kentum/satəm division, or the RUKI division (retraction of the sibilant s), which have been known for a century or so, there are a few less studied morphosyntactic features, often of a much vaguer nature, that equally group together a number of branches and/or languages. These include, for example:
– the presence of the verbal augment (past tense prefix *(H)e-) in Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Greek and Phrygian (Strunk 1992 [1994]);
– several isoglosses in the evolution of the PIE case system (such as the development of the agglutinating cases in Indo-Iranian and Tocharian; see e.g. Masica 1991: 230ff.; Schmidt 1992: 43; Kulikov 2011 [2012]: 295ff.);
– the emergence of the infinitive form of the verb (see e.g. Zehnder 2016);
– several types of evolution of constructions with non-canonical subjects (Barðdal & Smitherman 2009) or the two types of evolution of transitivity oppositions (syncretic vs. antisyncretic type, roughly corresponding to the West/East division within Indo-European branches; see Kulikov 2009);
– the emergence of a separate lexical class of adjectives (see Alfieri 2011).

There are three possible types of isoglosses, as far as their origin and nature are concerned.
1. Common innovations within a genetic group of languages; such innovations correspond to the divergent isoglosses, allowing the creation of phylogenetic trees.
2. Mutual contacts between daughter-languages of separate branches; these convergent isoglosses can originate either from direct borrowings between sister languages, or borrowings from a common substrate language into two or more recipient (substrate) languages (see Kulikov 2011).
3. Random coincidences and common drifts. Some convergent developments of such type can arise due to the general principles of natural morphology and phonology. In terms of markedness degree, it can be observed that unmarked outcomes are more widespread than the opposite (see Nichols 1999, but already Meillet 1922, discussed in Lazzeroni 1987).

During his stay in Rome, Prof. Kulikov is planning to hold a series of colloquia, seminars and public lectures, in order to discuss several crucial issues of his current research and of the proposed collaboration. The contribution of Prof. Kulikov as a visiting scholar will further consist in providing a theoretical and methodological basis for the identification, description and analysis of the convergent morphological isoglosses that connect Indo-European languages which are not bound by an direct genetic relationship (i.e. not descending from the same ancestor of the closest available level of reconstruction, such as Proto-Germanic for the attested Germanic languages or Latin for the Romance languages). In many instances, such isoglosses do not fit within the established branches of the Indo-European language family. As is well-known, the "Tree model", predominant in the field of IE linguistics since A. Schleicher (1862)is unable to explain branch-crossing isoglosses, as pointed out already by J. Schmidt (1872), who proposed an alternative "Wave model". However, while the Tree model served as a basis and general framework for a number of large systematic surveys of the IE family (from Delbrück & Brugmann's Grundriß onwards), the Wave model lacks a compendium of similar scale.

While detecting phonological isoglosses can essentially be based on regular and, mainly, well-established phonetic correspondences, the uncovery and study of the morphological isoglosses poses more problems. Indeed, when a linguistic sign becomes the subject of analysis, one of the central issues is establishing the character of semantic change. In particular, it is necessary to establish the relevant patterns of grammaticalisation. The same source construction can be grammaticalised in accordance with different scenarios in different languages. However, the common source of the resulting forms and constructions in the daughter languages can be accounted as a piece of evidence for a shared morphological innovation, i.e. an isogloss.

The suggested approach to the study of isoglosses has been recently discussed at an international conference organised jointly by the proponent and the invited scholar at the University of Thessaloniki (Greece), see https://sites.google.com/a/uniroma1.it/ie-isoglosses/home.

2.2 Obiettivi e risultati attesi

Goals
A thorough study of the system of isoglosses within Indo-European opens the way towards better understanding and, eventually, more adequate reconstruction of the main features of the Proto-Indo-European morphosyntax. The classical Indo-European studies often paid more attention the field of phonology, while the issues of morphological analysis were somewhat neglected. A deeper analysis and more convincing reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European morphosyntax increasingly attract the attention of Indo-Europeanists over the last decades. We can mention, among many others, such important studies as Lehmann 1974, Kortlandt 1983, Bauer 2000, Jasanoff 2003, Barðdal & Smitherman 2009 and Luraghi 2012.These works have greatly contributed to our knowledge and better understanding of the Proto-Indo-European morphosyntax, the fundamentals of which have been laid down sketched in such seminal works as Delbrück 1893–97 and Hirt 1934–37.

Moreover, while in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries Indo-European studies predominantly focused on historical, comparative and reconstructional aspects of the Indo-European languages, thus remaining within the descriptive and genetically-focused framework, from the end of the 20th century onwards Indo-European scholarship increasingly concentrates on the typological and explicative evaluation of the reconstructed proto-language and its historical
development(s) towards the reflexes attested in the daughter languages. In this perspective, the study of the convergent isoglosses represents one of the most promising tools for the analysis of the structure of Proto-Indo-European, its dialectal split and its further evolution towards actually attested Indo-European languages.

Among the goals of the collaboration between the proponent and the invited scholar should be addressing a number of open issues within the field of the Indo-European studies, with a special focus on the domain of morphology and syntax. These issues should include, among others:

• Typologically-oriented approach to the analysis of the archaic Indo-European morphosyntax and morphosyntactic reconstruction;
• Analysis of the Indo-European morphosyntax within the framework of the grammaticalization theory;
• The origins and mechanisms of the emergence of isoglosses;
• Indo-European isoglosses and early splits within Indo-European;
• Isoglosses in nominal, and especially adjectival, declension systems;
• Common developments in the derivative nominal morphology;
• Isoglosses in verbal morphology;
• Expansion and decline of non-canonical subject/object marking and other changes in syntactic patterns in Indo-European.

Our analysis will build up on the results in the field achieved by different researchers and will present evidence from the history of different groups within the Indo-European language family according to a unified typological basis.

Expected results
So far the project developed by the proponent was limited to the study of convergent processes in phonology. This new phase of the research program extends our approach to morphology and syntax. The invited scholar is particularly involved into the study of common developments in the syntax and morphology of the historically attested IE languages, so that his contribution will be of an inestimable value with this respect.

Among the expected results of this collaboration we should expect some new proposals concerning the individuation of the hitherto unnoticed morphological isoglosses within the Indo-European family of languages. The new data will be submitted for publication on some refereed journals or book series. A few possible (and preliminary) guidelines can be formulated as follows.

Morphological isoglosses
• Creation of a new adjectival declension through the agglutination of pronominal elements to the old nouns, in: Prakrits, Western Iranian languages, Khotanese, Slavic languages, and Germanic languages.
• Increasing productivity of the derivational velar suffix (going back to PIE *-ko) used for deriving adjectives, attested in a large number of "second generation" IE languages, from Middle Iranian to Slavic, Latin, Greek, Germanic (see Ciancaglini 2015).
• The rise of an infinitive formation from the dative/accusative case-form of an older verbal noun.

Syntactic isoglosses
• Evolution towards fixed word order (from the almost completely free word order supposed for Proto-IE).
• The generalization of the transitive construction, with a strong canonical subjecthood (see Bauer 2000, Kulikov 2012, Comrie 2006).
• Evolution from the existential possessive construction (such as Latin mihi est liber 'I have a book') towards the lexicalized transitive possessive predicate (such as English to have) that correlates with the change from free to fixed word order and the rise of configurationality (see Keidan 2008; cf. Baldi & Cuzzolin 2010).